The Years of Hunger

The fifth volume in a landmark series of independent volumes on the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, this work covers the years 1929-1937, the crucial period of the first two five-year plans. In these years the Soviet Union became a great industrial power, and the economic system took the form which, in its main features, it retained until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Agriculture was collectivised and the whole economy was subordinated to central state planning: the Stalinist political regime was consolidated a new social structure emerged. This was the first attempt of a major country to manage economic and social development by a comprehensive plan. The weaknesses which ultimately led to its failure may partly be traced back to the 1930s: the tendency to overinvestment and overtaut planning, the inability to innovate, and the frustration of the grandiose efforts to modernise agriculture. While the Soviet system ultimately failed, Soviet industrialisation was a crucial stage in spreading the economic and social transformation which began in England in the middle of the eighteenth century to the thousands of millions of peasants who lived on the borders of starvation in Asia, Africa and Latin America.-- Publisher description.